


Wish You Were Here

by S_L_Martin



Category: The Beatles
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 14:43:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10493130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S_L_Martin/pseuds/S_L_Martin
Summary: 1974





	

1974\. New York. John has spent a day recording all of the songs he and Paul used to perform in Hamburg. He's going to put a picture from Hamburg on the album cover: himself in a doorway, Paul and the others a blur going by. He and Paul and a select few will know what the picture represents and the general public will not. This is how he has worked for many years now.

Amazing, how you can be in Hamburg wishing for riches and fame, and then be in New York City, rich and famous, wishing you were leaning in a scuzzy doorway in Hamburg. In Hamburg, he’d thought he was in Hell, haha! He works on one of his newer songs:

_So, so you think you can tell?  
Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain?  
Can you tell a green field   
from a cold steel rail?  
A smile from a veil?  
Do you think you can tell?_

Tonight he will go out to the gay clubs with Elton and the newly-liberated queers will gather to worship their current idols: Queen, The Village People, Bowie, Elton himself. They will not register John as a queer icon at all.

He had a queer audience when he wasn't an icon. The "Savage Young Beatles" were always a draw for sexually-flexible beatniks and artists in Hamburg, Paris, and Liverpool. They had once had entire male audiences swooning for them. But for the Beatles, the choice had been to be queer OR to be an icon, and they had wanted to be icons. Now the queers had begun their war for freedom in earnest, and John was helplessly shut out of it.

_Did they get you to trade  
your heroes for ghosts?  
Hot ashes for trees?  
Hot air for a cool breeze?  
Cold comfort for change?  
Did you exchange   
a walk-on part in the war   
for a lead role in a CAGE?_

At least when he and Paul had been in it together, they could create a little bubble where they both knew the truth. They knew the punchline to the big joke. They could be in a worldwide fishbowl, everyone watching them, and they could scheme together about what they would present when they swam near the glass. They had thought they could get out of the bowl by ending the Beatles. They were trying to set themselves free. But it all went straight to hell. All they achieved at the end was to end up in separate fishbowls, just as trapped yet more alone than ever.

_How I wish, how I wish you were here.  
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,  
Running over the same old ground.  
What have we found?  
The same old fears.  
Wish you were here._

**Author's Note:**

> This fic exists in a universe where John and Paul ghostwrite songs for other artists when they wish to avoid scrutiny of their work.


End file.
